Their Panel is entitled "Between the Park and the Shantytown: Latin American Cities and the Environment during the Twentieth Century".

This panel explores the tensions between development and nature in Latin American citiesduring the twentieth century. Cities represent a particular environmental challenge as leaders andresidents struggle to balance the man-made habitat with natural elements. The desire to findequilibrium often stems from the immediate need to sustain the urban masses. The health andlivelihood of city dwellers require incredible inputs of energy and resources, as well asopportunities to seek respite in sunlight and fresh air. The sprinkling of green among thesprawling concrete, steel, and glass also reveals a deeper desire to create a very particular visionor aesthetic. Carefully sculpted parks, tree-lined avenues, and ordinances to stem the rising tideof pollution attempt to counteract uncontrolled growth and to present a modern, progressiveappearance. The creation of a balanced urban environment does not come easily, however. Thosein power must harness the means necessary for altering the cities and convince urbanites of theexigency of reforms. Unforeseen outcomes often highlight the illusion of control as well as theartificiality of many environmentally-driven actions.

From Rio de Janeiro to Mexico City, from Buenos Aires to Quito, these four papers offer uniqueperspectives on environmental policies in some of Latin America’s largest and most importantcities. Each presentation examines particular undertakings meant either to manage resources orto create a specific impression. While each approach varied in its success, the projectsunderscore the challenges of directing urban development and incorporating nature into the builtenvironment.

The Street’s Last Hurrah: Competing Motives and Contesting Spaces on Rio de Janeiro’s CentralAvenue, 1903-1920.

In 1906, Mayor Pereira Passos tore an audacious linear gash in Rio de Janeiro’s colonial urbanfabric, demolishing hundreds of private homes and businesses to create Avenida Central, astunning public space that was to become Brazil’s grand first impression to foreign visitors.Historians have tended to emphasis sanitation, transportation, and gentrification as the Avenue’sprimary motives, and have most often characterized the project as an elite effort to dislodge thepoor from their downtown tenements, thus giving birth to Rio’s hillside favelas. That work isoften persuasive, but we have neglected to fully examine beautification as a central motive forthe Avenue’s production. Sources after the event demonstrate how central beautification of thepublic realm was to the receivers, that is, those who would use and enjoy the street. The Avenuetook on an outsized place in the citizen’s identity and was conspicuously “displayed” innewspaper texts and magazine photographs for the next two decades. By approaching publicspace as one would a natural resource, my interest lies primarily in how city streets as a spatialresource are seen and used, and by whom. In many ways, Avenida Central was the last gasp ofthe traditional street in the built environment, a space understood in Portuguese culture as alogradouro, literally, a place to enjoy. The Avenida’s central function in the eyes of those whoused it was not for sanitation or transportation (in fact, streetcars were banned from running onthe Avenue), but as a grand public space, a linear central square, in which many diverse users, tobe described, still competed for the space on a relatively level playing field.

Crusade Against Charcoal, 1938-1942This paper emerges out of my dissertation looking at the shift in usage of Chapultepec Forest inMexico City in the 1920s-50s. As early as 1935, and following the Six-year Plan, the director ofthe recently created Autonomous Department of Forestry worked toward reducing the use offorestry products for heating and cooking. Miguel Angel de Quevedo, through his Department'snewly constructed Natural History Museum located in Chapultepec Forest, was able to take thiscampaign against charcoal to an unprecedented public scale. Though the 'Exhibition ofCombustion Devices Substituting those of Charcoal and Wood' lasted for only two weeks in July,1938, it generated, through daily newspapers, the First Forestry Convention, and legislation, adiscussion lasting through 1942. The opening of the Technological Museum in Chapultepec in1942 symbolized the trend whereby the forest was highlighted as an economic— and particularlyduring wartime, strategic and military—resource for use, rather than a cultural or environmentalone for preservation.

In 'Crusade against Charcoal' I trace the issue of charcoal and the campaign against not only itsproduction (often grouped with fires and logging), but particularly its use in the modernizingcapital of Mexico. With Chapultepec as a backdrop, those who (mis)used the forest—vis-à-visits products—were demeaning history and the nation. Yet, deficient citizens were not only thecharcoal producing- and using-, rural-descended masses, but also the 'ecologicalpaternalists' (Boyer, 2007) unable to relate to the realities of a rapidly-urbanizing population.

The military dictatorship that controlled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 remains most infamous forits human rights violations and campaign of state terror. However, historians have begun toexamine the broader social agenda that armed forces pursued during that period, and this paperexplores why the dictatorship made the environment quality of Buenos Aires a priority. As thepolitical, economic, and cultural center of the nation – not to mention home to one in threeArgentineans – Buenos Aires became the starting point of an intense effort to modernize andrationalize the nation. The military mayor, Brigadier Osvaldo Cacciatore, enacted a series ofreforms meant to set a guiding vision for urban development. As part of his efforts, he revampedtrash collection, broke ground on a massive green belt, relocated industries farther away fromcity center, and began an extensive tree planting campaign. This push to clean and green the cityclosely followed the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. Theconference specifically discussed pressing issues associated with the need to balancedevelopment with the protection of the natural environment in the third world. Given thereigning generals’ desire to make Buenos Aires, and by extension Argentina, on par with theWest, Cacciatore’s environmental policies served in that quest. Presenting an image ofenvironmental balance became chance for the military to prove its effectiveness and to transformthe capital.

Water Resources Management in Coastal Ecuador: An Historical Assessment of EnvironmentalSustainability and Power, 1950-2000.

For this project, I am examining the intersection of water resource policy and environmentalsustainability in Ecuador during the period between 1950 and 2000, and specifically examiningthe social, economic, and environmental impacts as a result of hydroelectric power plants beingbuilt (to supply electricity to the burgeoning cities of Quito and Guayaquil) with internationalfunds during this period. Using the history of the development of the Daule Peripa Dam andMarcel Laniado de Wind Hydroelectric Plant (1982-1995) as a prime example, this paper intendsto unpack the legacy of inefficient and unsustainable water management practices in Ecuadorthat have plagued the country for decades. Construction of the reservoir associated with theseinfrastructure projects forced 14,965 farmers from their land and left 63 communities isolated.Deterioration of the ecosystems of the Rivers Daule and Peripa resulted, and lack of maintenanceled to water eutrophication. Significant sedimentation caused by the constant accumulation ofsandy soils washed by the Daule and Peripa rivers into the reservoir bottom has caused the totalreservoir water capacity to decrease and speeds up the wear on the turbines. Given these issues,by recommending strategies that encompass a wide range of economically- and environmentallyfriendlypractices, the goal is to present new models for development that reflect an historicalapproach.